The Linux desktop has come a long way. It's a fully usable, stable, and secure operating system that can be used quite easily by the masses. Not too long ago, Sun figured they could do the same by starting Project Indiana, which is supposed to deliver a complete distribution of OpenSolaris in a manner similar to GNU/Linux. After using the latest version for a while, I'm wondering: why?

It's not a troll to ask why they didn't just use the Debian package system (or rpm or) instead of rolling their own and leaving their would-be users with very few packages and new buggy tools to annoy.

"It's not a troll to ask why they didn't just use the Debian package system (or rpm or) instead of rolling their own and leaving their would-be users with very few packages and new buggy tools to annoy."

A lot of people have asked this question, and a lot of it has been around the fact that to do package management on OpenSolaris you have to worry about a lot of other things that are substantially different compared to Linux - SMF, various virtualization technologies, ZFS, etc... The thought was the number of patches it would take to port dpkg/rpm/whatever across would be pretty substantial with a strong likelihood of having to maintain them since they wouldn't get merged upstream. IPS is evolving technology and does have issues, but it's getting better and better with every release (we hope to solve the package renaming issues to move away from confusing SUNW prefixes with the next release btw)